This is a story of ambition and the awakening of maturity. It tells of the coming of age of Eddie Higgins, Joe Trent and Tony Jenner, three young men from Lancashire. While all of them begin their adult lives by serving apprenticeships at a small engineering firm, Up is the best place to be follows their attempts to transcend the limitations of a working-class upbringing and their limited educational opportunities in North West England in the 1960s. Set in a time of profound social change, when social and class barriers began to be dismantled, James Lythgoe shows the impact of this upheaval on the lives of ordinary young men, who by the end of the novel have found that their lives have developed in ways they could not have expected, or even imagined.